Fast Facts
- Named for: Rwanda, ku-aanda or anda in the native language, expanding, referring to the consolidation and expansion of the Kingdom of Rwanda.
- Capital: Kigali
- Long/Lat: 1.5 S/30.3 E, 9500 miles or 19 hours east from Castro Valley
- Population: 14.1 million or 200 CVs.
- Size: 10,200 sq mi, 560 CVs
- Avg temp in April: 80 F/26 C but varies because mountainous
- Median household income: $7,200 annually
- Ethnicity: 84% Hutu, 14% Tutsi, 1% Twa. And therein lies a tale.
- Main industries: Precious stones, coffee, ores, i.e. natural resources scooped out by places like UAE, China, and the US.
Rwanda is a place of beauty and tragedy. Its nickname is “Land of a Thousand Hills” because of its lush mountains, formed as part of the Great Rift. This is near the place where humans were born, where “Lucy” and her hominid friends put their babies in a sling, stood up and started hunting and gathering.
That is, Rwanda is not only its genocide. The genocide was mostly what I had known, that it was a place of massacre, where modern tools of warfare facilitated murder on a large scale when an uneasy truce was broken. But Rwanda also known for its mountain gorillas, which are prized by both poachers and tourists, as well as for its beautiful landscapes. To explain Rwanda is just a few paragraphs is not easy, but let’s try.
Rwanda is a landlocked country in central East Africa, bordered by the much larger Uganda, Tanzania, and Democratic Republic of the Congo. The birthplace of humans is thought to be a little further north, in Kenya and Ethiopia, but the hominids who took those first evolutionary steps would have quickly migrated here as well as both northeast to the Fertile Crescent. People known as the Urewe had villages here at least as early as 1000 B.C.E., if not earlier.
Here’s the thing. Much of modern archaeology is relatively recent, and began in the Middle East and Europe for historical reasons. Africa’s archaeology has not been much explored, and the more unstable the political environment, the less it has been researched. Rwanda has suffered political upheaval for nearly a century, so it’s possible we just don’t know what early humans did here. There may be exciting secrets underneath those hills!
We do know where the hills came from. There are three continental plates running through this spot, and they are separating. As that happens, volcanoes, hills, mountain and fertile soil–voila! Land of a 1000 hills!
The mountain hills are covered with flora and fauna, and one of the more famous fauna is the mountain gorillas. The gorilla genus split off from the primates about 12 million years ago, evolving into three species of gorillas. The mountain gorillas are endangered, but conservation efforts have helped them bounce back (26% increase in the last decade). Still, there are only about a thousand left at the moment.
Dian Fossey’s work with the mountain gorillas made them (and her) world famous, as told in the movie Gorillas in the Mist. Clearly, poachers are bad, and she helped shine a spotlight on the endangerment of the animals. However, Fossey also was a naturalist studying these creatures in a foreign country and seemed heedless that her actions antagonized the locals. Again, killing beautiful animals illegally is wrong, but if a Rwandan were to come into my neighborhood and get angry at me for trying to eliminate gophers, wild turkeys or mule deer, I would not be happy about it. Fossey, by the end, treated not just poachers but Rwandans in general as lesser than her magnificent gorillas. Sometimes capturing and torturing poachers. Her legacy is complicated.
The Rwandan tribal rivalry and genocide is also complicated. It might be easy to say Genocide Bad! the People who did it were Bad, let’s get rid of Them! Yet understanding why and how–not to excuse but to prevent a recurrence–might be useful. The best model I can think of are the descendants of Cain and Abel. (And, please, if you think this misses the mark, please correct me)
For centuries, there were farmers and ranchers: people who grew crops and people who raised cattle. Both sustained their tribes. Over time, the ranchers–the cattlemen–became more respected. Not necessarily by Yahweh as Abel is in The Bible, but by other ranchers and everyone with status. These cattlemen of wealth started to consider themselves the elite class. There were fewer of them, but they grabbed a bigger share of the tribal power. The aristocratic cattlemen were the Tutsi.
The farmers, the Hutu, were treated as second-class citizens, and the rules of society required bride payments in cattle, social status in cattle, powerful positions based on cattle, which Hutu did not have. There were more Hutus than Tutsis, and a Hutu could acquire cattle and leverage their own status, but there would always be more farmers than cattle owners. Also, as the kingdom successfully expanded–because Rwanda means expanding–the newly acquired citizens automatically became the lesser-caste Hutus.
When the colonizing Europeans moved in, they did not treat all the Rwandans as equally inferior. Remembering the eugenic theories of 1880-1940, it not be surprising that the Germans and Belgians even suggested that the Tutsi were naturally superior, some claiming that they were taller or fairer-skinned, i.e. racially more pure. Germans originally “took” the country as a colony, but they were pushed out by the Belgians. In 1935, the Belgians even required identity cards, which labeled people as Tutsi, Hutu, or Twe (a very small, low caste minority).
Between 1959-1962, the Rwandans pushed the Belgians out to earn their independence. But it was mainly rebel Hutu military groups who expelled both ruling Tutsies and Europeans. They also massacred Tutsi elites, though they didn’t earn the same notoriety as it would later. Still, the French Revolution might be a good model. The large, downtrodden majority seized power. Tutsi became exiled rebels, and they continued attacks from their bases across the borders.
In 1973, a moderate Hutu named Juvénal Habyarimana, came into power. Although he was Hutu, he started reducing the discrimination and raising the economic situation for both Hutu and Tutsis. Some kind of equilibrium seemed to be just over the horizon. His plane was blown up in 1994.
The extremist Hutus took power, armed to the teeth and nursing centuries of being oppressed. It’s not possible to justify the violence they unleashed, but it’s a little understandable. In other words, their genocide wasn’t based on political power, money, or racial superiority. It was from being majority, having been treated as inferior, and then finally gaining access to weapons and power.
Nearly a million people, Tutsies and any moderate Hutus, were killed in a little more than 100 days. The scale of it is unimaginable. The level of violence is unthinkable. I will refrain from listing the horrors.
Tutsi rebels, part of a group called the Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF), ultimately “won” the civil war and took back power. The Hutu extremists then fled. Currently, the head of Rwanda is Tutsi, and Rwanda has been trying to heal itself by holding appropriate trials and assigning accountability on all sides. They are trying to remove the tribal labels and strive for truth, using their mutual experiences and memories in mourning the slain to move forward.
Humans have never been very good at this–the Cain/Abel story is one of the oldest and first in Genesis. I don’t know if the Rwandans can figure it out. Many countries have similar divides and weaponize the media to intensify the divisions. My hope is that their tragedy can teach us before we are all armed to the teeth.